A Comparison of Teacher Quality in Math for Late Elementary and Middle School Students With and Without Disabilities

Students with disabilities (SWDs) perform below their peers in math on national and state assessments. The quality of teachers who provide these students with math instruction is an unexamined variable that could influence this low achievement. We used data from more than 1 million students to compare the quality of teachers assigned to teach math to fourth- through eighth-grade SWDs and students without disabilities, using multiple indicators of teacher quality. Overall, SWDs had access to teachers of similar quality as their peers, but grouping all disabilities masked heterogeneity. Students with learning disabilities were only 2 to 8 percentage points more likely than their peers to have teachers with special education certification. Based on our findings, the low math achievement of SWDs is unlikely to be the result of limited access to the same teacher quality as their peers without disabilities.